PALO ALTO, Calif., and MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., May 30 /PRNewswire/ -- Incyte Genomics, Inc. (Nasdaq: INCY - news), the leading genomic information company, and Iconix Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a privately held biotechnology company, today announced plans to collaborate on the development and commercialization of a next-generation chemogenomic information product. Under the agreement, Incyte will exclusively market and sell ChemExpress(TM), Iconix's integrated chemogenomic system of data, data management tools, and bio- and chemoinformatics data mining software. Iconix will integrate Incyte's LifeExpress Lead(TM) database into ChemExpress under an exclusive license from Incyte. This will enable the development of the first multi-array platform gene expression information product available to the pharmaceutical industry. In addition, Incyte will make an equity investment in Iconix. Financial terms were not disclosed.
``Most of the bottleneck in pharmaceutical development today occurs in drug candidate selection and optimization,'' said Roy A. Whitfield, Chief Executive Officer of Incyte. ``ChemExpress, incorporated with our LifeExpress Lead product, will provide drug designers a powerful information and analytical system that should accelerate target prioritization, drug candidate optimization and predictive toxicology. The adoption of ChemExpress by our life sciences information customers will ultimately lead to the faster development of more effective and safer drugs.''
In addition to the exclusive license to LifeExpress Lead, a gene expression database related to drug compound mechanisms of action, pathways and toxicity, Incyte will also grant Iconix a non-exclusive license for access to its LifeSeq® and ZooSeq® databases. Iconix will also license certain Incyte intellectual property for development of ChemExpress, and use of Incyte's LifeArray expression array technology for chemogenomic drug profiling. Incyte will exclusively market and sell ChemExpress to pharmaceutical and biotechnology customers, with Iconix maintaining exclusive rights to enter into proprietary chemogenomics collaborations with industry partners.
``Up to ninety percent of all drug development candidates still fail to produce safe, efficacious and marketable therapies,'' said Keith Bostian, Iconix's President and CEO. ``ChemExpress fills an important need in the pharmaceutical industry-reducing the dramatic rate of attrition in drug development by allowing scientists the ability to predict which drug candidates may fail and which may succeed before preclinical studies and human clinical trials are initiated.''
ChemExpress is a large-scale information and analysis system that connects (a) genomic and biological activity data with (b) diverse drug molecule and other chemical structures and (c) drug pharmacology and toxicology information. Iconix discovers relationships between tens of thousands of genes, proteins, and drug molecules and builds maps of these relationships in ChemExpress. The chemogenomic interactions are identified from Iconix's extensive expression array and pharmacologic bioassay profiling studies. Iconix also annotates the profiled genes, proteins and drugs with extensive scientific and patent literature information on known biological functions, disease relevance, protein/chemical interactions and drug pharmacology and toxicity. This level of data integration allows scientists conducting expression array experiments to analyze their results in the context of reference information on known molecular interactions between drug candidates and thousands of genes and proteins. Medicinal chemists and other drug designers are also able to quickly query ChemExpress with the structures of novel drug candidates in order to identify similarities with established drugs and toxic chemicals for which the mechanism of action, therapeutic effects and toxicity are known.
Iconix Pharmaceuticals, Inc., is a leader in the emerging field of chemogenomics. Iconix's integrated technologies allow life sciences researchers to discover drug candidates for novel therapeutic targets and to predict the potential efficacy and toxicity of drug candidates at the earliest stages of drug design. Iconix's flagship product is ChemExpress, a pharmaceutical development support system that provides drug designers with chemogenomic profiles for the known universe of drug and toxic molecules. Iconix also maintains internal drug discovery and development programs based on novel targets resulting from genomic studies. In addition to Incyte, Iconix collaborates with Motorola, Inc. (NYSE: MOT - news) and its BioChip Systems Division, Microcide Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Nasdaq: MCDE - news) in the area of anti-viral therapeutics, and Metabolex, Inc. in the field of Type II diabetes. For more information, visit Iconix's web site at iconixpharm.com . |
